Can you ask patients for Google reviews? Where AHPRA draws the line

Your patients are free to post whatever they like about you on Google. They are members of the public writing on a platform you do not own and cannot control. Your Google Business Profile carrying those reviews is not you advertising, and you are not expected to police them or take them down.

Your advertising is a different thing entirely. Your website, your Google Ads, your Meta ads, your social posts, your printed material, the wall of the waiting room. Anything you publish to promote a regulated health service sits under Section 133 of the National Law, which prohibits testimonials about the clinical aspects of that service.

A testimonial, in AHPRA's own testimonial guidance, is a positive statement about the clinical aspects of a regulated health service, used in advertising. The line is what the statement is about, not where it first appeared.

So the question is never whether the review exists. It is whether you have picked it up and used it to promote yourself.

Leaving a glowing review where the patient posted it is fine. Pasting the same sentence onto your home page, into an ad headline, or over the top of a social tile is the moment it becomes a testimonial in your advertising. It does not matter that it is genuine, that they wrote it unprompted, or that it was public before you touched it.

The nuance worth holding on to is that not every review is about clinical care. A comment about reception, parking, how easy the booking was, or how well someone explained things is describing the experience, not the treatment. Those sit outside the testimonial line. Read the whole quote before you use one, though. A single sentence about pain easing drags the rest of it across.

Nothing stops you asking a patient for a review or for feedback. AHPRA's testimonial guidance says the prohibition "does not affect patients sharing information, expressing their views online or posting reviews on review platforms". The patient's half of this was never restricted.

What AHPRA does advise against is narrower, and it is the bit clinics miss. In its 2018 statement launching the testimonial tool, getting it right "means not encouraging patients to leave testimonials and removing testimonials published on websites or other online platforms which they control or administer".

So the ask has to stay an ask for feedback, never a nudge towards describing their treatment. On the surfaces you control, your own site and your own pages, testimonials about clinical care come down. On platforms you do not control, the testimonial guidance is explicit that "advertisers are not responsible for removing (or trying to have removed) testimonials published on platforms they do not control".

The same 2018 statement draws the content line for you. "Comments about friendly staff, plenty of parking or extended opening hours, for example, can be used to advertise a regulated health service but under the law advertising cannot include testimonials about clinical care."

The rest of the review rules are not AHPRA's at all. They are misleading conduct rules, and they live in the ACCC's guidance on online reviews. It is against the law to create fake or misleading reviews, or to arrange for someone else to create them.

That guidance is where the incentive rule comes from too. Offering something for a positive review risks breaching the law, and any incentive you do offer has to be "applied regardless of whether the reviewer leaves a positive or negative review" and clearly disclosed.

Two more from the same page. A review written by someone connected to your business, without that connection disclosed, can mislead, and so can a review edited after it was created. That is why never writing it for them and never tidying it up are real rules rather than cautious ones.

AHPRA lands in the same place from the other direction. Its testimonial guidance says selectively editing or publishing reviews "has the potential to be false, misleading or deceptive and breach the advertising requirements of the National Law". Asking only the patients you expect to be pleased is the same instinct as publishing only the reviews that flatter you.

Healthcare has already had the expensive version of this argument. The ACCC records the Federal Court ordering HealthEngine to pay $2.9 million in penalties, including for publishing misleading patient reviews. That is the precedent sitting behind every line above.

The review sits outside your control. Your reply does not. Anything you write underneath is published by you, about a regulated health service, which puts it inside the same rules.

There is a second issue underneath that one. A reply that names someone's treatment, thanks them for their progress, or even says it was lovely to see them, confirms that person was a patient. They may have chosen to disclose that themselves. Confirming it is still your disclosure, on a public page, about someone else's health.

The safe reply is short, warm and non clinical. Thank them for the feedback. Do not name the treatment, do not comment on how they are doing, and do not confirm or deny that they were ever seen. The same shape works for a negative review, where the temptation to correct the record is much stronger and the risk is much higher.

None of this means your reviews are wasted. They are doing real work where they sit, and there are several ways to get value from them without lifting a single sentence into your advertising.